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Awakenings

Awakenings - which inspired the major motion picture - is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and their extraordinary transformations.

The Mind's Eye

An exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals - including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill.

Hallucinations

Have you ever seen something that wasn't really there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing? Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. People with migraines may see shimmering arcs of light or tiny, Lilliputian figures of animals and people.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf

In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.

An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

To these seven narratives of neurological disorder Dr. Sacks brings the same humanity, poetic observation, and infectious sense of wonder that are apparent in his bestsellers Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. These men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality.

On the Move: A Life

From its opening minutes on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does - humans are a musical species.

Gratitude

No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

Oaxaca Journal

Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

Jon Ronson is fascinated by madness, extraordinary behaviour and the human mind. He has spent his life investigating crazy events, following fascinating people and unearthing unusual stories. Collected here from various sources (including the Guardian and GQ America) are the best of his adventures.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

Joining the ranks of popular science classics like The Botany of Desire and The Selfish Gene, a groundbreaking, wondrously informative, and vastly entertaining examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin - a "microbe's-eye view" of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on Earth.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"

At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

In What Doctors Feel, Dr. Danielle Ofri has taken on the task of dissecting the hidden emotional responses of doctors, and how these directly influence patients. How do the stresses of medical life - from paperwork to grueling hours to lawsuits to facing death - affect the medical care that doctors can offer their patients? Digging deep into the lives of doctors, Ofri examines the daunting range of emotions - shame, anger, empathy, frustration, hope, pride, occasionally despair, and sometimes even love - that permeate the contemporary doctor-patient connection.

A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

In the aftermath of 9/11, Kevin Hazzard felt that something was missing from his life - his days were too safe, too routine. A failed salesman turned local reporter, he wanted to test himself, see how he might respond to pressure and danger. He signed up for emergency medical training and became, at age 26, a newly minted EMT running calls in the worst sections of Atlanta. His life entered a different realm - one of blood, violence, and amazing grace.

Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion

Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation. Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself.

Publisher's Summary

Dr. Oliver Sacks' books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their extraordinary compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey when he finds that his leg uncannily no longer feels like part of his body.

Sacks's brilliant description of his crisis and eventual recovery is not only an illuminating examination of the experience of patienthood and the inner nature of illness and health but also a fascinating exploration of the physical basis of identity.

PLEASE NOTE: Some changes have been made to the original manuscript with the permission of Oliver Sacks.

What the Critics Say

"A neurologist in [the] great tradition... [this is] a narrative comparable to Conrad's The Secret Sharer." (The New York Review of Books)

"In calling for a neurology of the soul and a deeper and more humane medicine, Sacks's remarkable book raises issues of profound importance for everyone interested in humane health care and the human application of science." (The Washington Post Book World)

While this is a fine book with an amazing true story, I feel the need to put out a word of caution. The degree to which sachs goes off on his poetic existential meanderings in this book is excessive . It requires patience and a fair amount of concentration to get through these unfortunately verbose tirades. An editor really should have tightened it up. This book does have a great story and immense insight that should be heard by everyone. It will be of particular value to doctors, nurses and caregivers. I really love sacks work but his verbosity gets to be too much at times.

Audible just brought this one out in audio, a year or so after Sacks' latest "The Mind's Eye"; my library didn't have a print copy of "Leg", so I spent a credit on it. Both books deal with the issue of doctor-as-patient, but this one's less approachable. Once he's rescued in Norway, and sent off to Britain for treatment, the story becomes progressively more inward and self-absorbed. I was interested when he veered towards the mind-body connection in healing, but otherwise his thoughts were just that ... thoughts. Not very focused ones either - not quite metaphysical, not really philosophical, and a little medical stuff thrown in. For Sacks fans only, those new to his stuff would probably never read another.

There is so much to gain from the Oliver's stories. For me, Sacks's articulations help me to potentiate and mature my ability to empathize. His description of events also help me comprehend the significance of other peoples personal experiences. This is great book for people walking the path of profound maturity.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

Most: Snippets of the history of neurology. Least: the (unusual for Sacks) incessant, off-topic stray into his own tedious emotional outlook on the whole process of injury/shock/acceptance/healing/triumph. It was if he wrote this so his readership could give him free amateur psychotherapy. In the end, this was an unengaging emotion-rich/fact-sparse book about the process of healing up a broken leg. Not a Sack's Best.

What does Jonathan Davis and Oliver Sacks (Introduction) bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Oliver Sacks normally writes a fine, engaging book. This one was such a sleeper though, that at least one didn't have to keep one's eyes open to get through it.

Did A Leg to Stand On inspire you to do anything?

Yes- frequent incursions into falling asleep.

Any additional comments?

I wouldn't judge the whole excellent spectrum of Oliver Sack's excellent books by this one flopper. I'll not give up on purchasing his other audio books, even though iIve also read most of them in print form.

The only interesting part was the beginning, up to the point of the doctor's recovery from surgery. From then on, it became boring, listening to the inner thoughts and uncertainties of interest only to students of neurology.